Not good news: More than half of the world’s oceans have changed colors in the past 20 years, becoming more green than blue. The culprit? Climate change. In a study, published Wednesday in Nature, decades worth of research showed 56 percent of the world’s oceans experienced color change between 2002 to 2022.
“The study’s authors say that natural instances, like seasonal or yearly variations to phytoplankton blooms, don’t explain the oceans’ shift in color, and don’t account for the change. Instead, researchers say the greening might better be explained by carbon dioxide absorption by plankton and algae communities and could signal an even more serious problem: Oceans absorb nearly 25 percent* of the world’s carbon emissions and may not be able to absorb more in the future.”